It is known in the prior art for users to share user-generated content (UGC) over the internet. It can be especially challenging to distribute files containing video content over the internet, such as, for example, multimedia files that contain both video and audio content. For convenience, files containing video content may be referred to hereinafter as “videos.”
Typically, if a person wants to share a video with another, he or she might send an email or instant message containing a link to a web page that contains the video (be it embedded or source web page). Such videos are often hosted by user-generated video on-demand services such as YouTube, DailyMotion, and MySpaceTV and are typically encoded according to the Adobe Flash Video (FLV) standards, in part because Adobe FLV files can be served from a server without the need to employ complex broadcasting software. Generally speaking, as long as the FLV is accessible using a stateless protocol such as HTTP or RMTP, it can be consumed by an Adobe Flash client. When the client accesses the FLV, it starts to download the file and starts playing immediately from the beginning of the file.
Users of user-generated content distribution sites such as those mentioned above typically watch videos independently of one another. The clients will start playing the video at different times, and the clients may pause playback or search through the video to specific locations. It may be possible for multiple clients to watch a video at the same time in the on-demand world (e.g., by getting on the phone and agreeing to press the PLAY button on the embedded player at the same time), but such coordination is cumbersome and is impractical when there are more than two parties that would like to watch the video in synchronized fashion and share their opinion. Thus, in this on-demand world, there generally is no shared viewing experience.
The experience of watching videos at the same time as other viewers, especially when chat programs make it possible to communicate with the other viewers in real time and discuss what is playing, can be a source of both entertainment and enhanced communication. Certain websites that host user-generated content have offered some capability for creating a synchronous viewing experience for videos that are hosted on that site. Such synchronous viewing typically involves installing protocols in the host that provide synchronization, for example, live streaming protocols (e.g., Microsoft Media Server broadcasting). Such protocols generally are more complex and have additional resource requirements compared to on-demand protocols of the types discussed above.